British Airways (BA) is using digital pen and paper technology to speed up the turnaround time of aircraft landing at London’s Heathrow and Gatwick airports.

The tool allows dispatchers to communicate information from airside to the control centre in real time and helps avoid delays.

Following a trial started in April last year, the Anoto-supplied devices were introduced at departures for Heathrow’s terminals Four and One at the end of 2007, and have been used at Terminal Five since its opening in March, as well as Gatwick airport since earlier this year.

BA’s operations head of IT, Neil Clark, said that the technology was introduced to support the newly created role of turnaround manager.

“Managing the aircraft turnaround at an airport such as Heathrow is extremely challenging because of the infrastructure, congestion and other factors that make operation very tight within the timescales that our schedule allows,” said Clark.

“So we needed to have a role in charge of managing that critical area of the business effectively and new technology to support their work.”

With the digital pen system, a built-in infrared camera reads handwritten information and transfers data to the airline’s back-office systems via a Bluetooth-enabled mobile phone. The information is then made available to the pilot and the dispatch team on a secure web page.

Previously, staff working at departures would need to record information about all the cargo and baggage loaded onto the plane and the location of those items using a manual process.

Workers would then need to find a computer to load the data onto a legacy system that would transmit flight load information to the operations team, a procedure that risked missing take-off slots and incurring fines.

“One of the key benefits of introducing innovation is that while turnaround managers are able to perform their job effectively, they do not need to leave the aircraft’s side during the departure process as all the data is transmitted in real time to our centralised load control,” said Clark.